Chapter 211 — What She Walked Away From

Chapter 211: Chapter 211 — What She Walked Away From

It rained three nights later, the first real rain in weeks, and Arlen came home from a Floor Six contract soaked through and thoroughly sick of wet boots.

He’d barely gotten his cloak off in the hall when Yveth’s door opened at the end of it.

"Stop dripping on my floor."

"I’m trying."

"Try harder. Come here."

Her room was warmer than the rest of the inn, a small fire going in the grate she rarely used. She’d already set a towel on the chair. He toweled his hair while she sat on the edge of the bed with her feet tucked under her, watching the fire instead of him.

She was quiet in a way he was starting to recognize. Not sulking. Deciding something.

"You’ve got a look," he said.

"I don’t have a look."

"You’ve got a look."

"Fine." She picked at the edge of the blanket. "You asked me once why I left. Not those words. Something close."

"I didn’t ask."

"You didn’t. I said it and you didn’t ask." She almost smiled. "That’s the part I liked. That you didn’t."

He sat down on the other end of the bed, not too close. The rain kept up against the window.

"I don’t need to know," he said.

"I know you don’t. That’s why I’m telling you." She drew a breath and let it out slowly. "Give me a minute. I’ve never said this out loud."

He gave her a minute. She watched the fire.

"My family traded," she said finally. "Spice, mostly. Dye, some years. Three warehouses on the river, a house with a garden, servants who knew my name and said it very politely. My father was good at it. Everyone said so."

"That sounds comfortable."

"It was. That’s the annoying part. I wasn’t unhappy." She shrugged. "I want you to understand that. Nobody hit me. Nobody starved me. I had books and a good tutor and a mother who was clever and tired."

"Tired of what?"

"Being the clever one in a house that didn’t need her to be." Yveth laughed, short and dry. "I got that from her, I think."

The fire popped. She waited for it to settle.

"There was another house. Bigger than ours. Coastal. They had ships, and we had the river contracts, and someone on each side figured out that if the two of us were joined, neither one would ever have to compete with the other again." She said it flatly, like reading a ledger entry. "I was six when they first talked about it. Not to me. Over my head, at dinner, while I ate."

"Six."

"They didn’t decide anything then. It was just the shape of it. Something I’d grow into." She looked at her hands. "By sixteen, everything I learned pointed at it. How to run a household. How to read a contract. How to smile at people I didn’t like without it reaching my eyes. It was all so reasonable."

"And the man?"

"Tessin. He was fine." She said it too quickly. "Polite. Handsome, in a well-fed way. He talked about horses. I sat through three dinners with him and could not have told you one thing he believed in."

"Did he know you didn’t want it?"

"I don’t think it occurred to him that I could." She shook her head. "That wasn’t cruelty. That was the whole point. It was never supposed to be my decision."

Arlen didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure anything he could say would help, and she didn’t seem to want him to.

"The contracts were drawn up when I was twenty-one," Yveth said. "I read them. My father let me, which he considered generous. There was a clause about my name. After the wedding, I’d sign as a member of their house. Every document. Every ledger. My handwriting on their business, for the rest of my life."

"A signature on someone else’s ledger."

She looked at him, and her expression cracked, just slightly. "Yes. That’s exactly what it was."

"You keep a ledger now."

"Every night." She smiled at the fire. "Mine. My handwriting, my numbers, my mistakes. I check them twice because they’re mine to get wrong."

He understood then a little of why she sat up over the books after everyone else went to bed, why she treated the inn’s accounts like something close to sacred.

"When did you go?" he asked.

"Two weeks before the wedding. Middle of the night. I took two dresses, a knife, and about forty silver I’d saved from my allowance over six years." She said it with a kind of grim humor. "I walked out through the kitchen garden so no one would hear the front door. My mother was standing at the window when I passed. She saw me. She didn’t say a word."

"She let you go."

"She let me go." Yveth’s voice thinned. "I’ve wondered about that every year since. Whether she was giving me something. Or just too tired to stop me."

"Which do you think?"

"Both, probably. People can be both." She wiped her eye with the back of her hand, quick, like she was annoyed at it. "I never wrote to her. I should have. I told myself it wasn’t safe. That was partly true."

"And partly not."

"And partly I was a coward." She said it plainly. "It’s fine. I’ve made my peace with it. Mostly."

The rain had softened outside. A single log shifted in the grate.

"I worked kitchens first," she said. "Then a tavern, then a bigger tavern, then I saved enough to buy into a failing inn near the guild district. This one. It took eight years before the roof stopped leaking." She smiled faintly. "I’ve never been so proud of anything in my life."

"You should be."

"I am." She tilted her head. "That’s why I said it, that night. When you asked why you kept going down there. I said I’d left somewhere. It’s the first time in years I’d said it to anyone."

"I remember."

"You remembered." She said it softly, a little surprised, like she still hadn’t gotten used to being listened to. "Most people wouldn’t have."

He reached over and took her hand. She let him, and turned her palm up.

"I’m not asking you for anything," she said. "I want to be clear about that. I don’t want you to think this is a condition."

"It’s not."

"Good. Because I meant it, before. About tomorrow morning being the same as this morning."

"It’s the same," Arlen said. "I’m still here, if you want me to be."

She didn’t answer right away. Then she leaned over and set her forehead against his shoulder, and stayed there, breathing slowly.

"I do," she said, muffled. "Want you to be."

"Then that’s easy."

"It’s not," she said. "But it’s good."

They sat like that until the fire burned low. He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t ask him to. Eventually she reached up and turned the lamp down, and the room went soft and orange at the edges.

Outside, the last of the rain ran off the eaves in slow, uneven drops.